Nurturing curiosity

The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web as a source of information, a venue for publishing, and a forum for dialogue now defines libraries nearly as much as the more familiar milieu of printed texts. The technological dimensions of this shift are less intriguing than the cultural ones. And from where I sit, the developments are a decidedly mixed blessing.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that the best a researcher in theology could hope for was to visit a theological library (if it was close enough) and search its card catalog, which did a brilliant job of opening the doors to the local collection. Now, ready access to all the catalogs we want is the norm, from wherever we are connected.